Some philosophers think that there is no such thing as human nature, that humans do not have a stable nature. Other philosophers consider human nature to be defensible. Two of them are Hobbes and Rousseau. While Hobbes argues that people are inherently bad; Rousseau, on the contrary, argues that people are good. We can compare Hobbes to the left, that is, to the logical side of our brain; Rousseau to the right, that is, the emotional side of our brain.
Hobbes argues that everything in the universe consists of matter, physics, and mathematics; while at the same time, human beings are selfish, and inclined to violence and evil. According to him, where there is no strong state that is power, people try to destroy and dominate each other. But according to Rousseau, there can be no virtue without citizens, no freedom without virtue, no state without freedom so for him, the state belongs to the people, not the government. In the novel Emilio o de la Educación published in 1762, he used the phrase “human is good by nature” but this is a teaching of Mencius, who lived between 372 and 289 BC. According to the teaching of Mencius, every human being is born with four basic emotions; pity, shame, respect, and a sense of right or wrong. These four feelings can translate into the four basic virtues: goodness, honesty, morality, and wisdom.
If you ask me, human nature is both good and bad, because we use both the right and the left side of our brain. We use our emotions while using our logic. It is human nature to survive. People polarized our actions for survival as good and bad, although the two of them were the same people were too stupid to understand that. They called those who did things that people disliked as bad people but those who do the things that everyone had in common were called good people. As a result, it was people again that separated people. Do we then conclude that humans are inherently evil?
Maybe we’re looking for the answer in the wrong place. Or rather, we are looking for the question in the wrong place. Yes yes, why do we think that good or bad is human? Isn’t it life that made us this way? Don’t we be created by factors such as the family, city, or country we were born in? Aren’t we made by people influencing people, good or bad?
If what we call human beings is too clumsy to be good and too conscientious to be evil, then what are we? Are we too helpless to find answers to these, or are we too special to have answers? Maybe we care too much about ourselves. Is human life not long enough to find these answers, nor short enough to live without answers?